Creating order out of the chaos of a tcpdump.

It's mean, its lean,its a network traffic siphoning machine. Its tcpdump and it most probably resides on a machine near you. Its greatest beauty is to snaffle up ethernet packets for your baby blue eyed perusal. Unfortunately unless you are of the assimilated kind the output of tcpdump is kinda hard to read. In fact it looks rather chaotic. This is where a neat little perl script can help. It is called chaosreader and you can find it
here. The web site also has a lot of information on how to use it as well as examples and a traversable sample output. Just downloading the program and by feeding it your tcpdump file it extracts sessions, pictures and data files and then presents it all in a plain but understandable web report. Then with your favourite browser just open up the index.html and see what your snooping brought you.

I've always been fascinated with graphics and wrote my first drawing program on the venerable apple ][e. After discovering the x86 IBM clones and wrangling my way into the computer industry I'm now immersed in work as a System Administrator, OS builder (linuxfromscratch) and general technohead.